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Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Programming Insights

overcommitted.dev | Women in Tech and Tech Mentorship

Join Overcommitted for insightful conversations with women in tech, software engineers, and programming experts focused on advancing software engineering careers. Explore topics such as software ethics, system reliability, infrastructure resilience, programming best practices, and agentic AI development. Our hosts share career insights and tech mentorship to boost developer productivity and code quality for passionate programmers and software engineers alike.

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  • 27 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 41 min
  • English

Episodes 27

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  • S1 · E60
    May 19 · 47 min

    Design Engineering, Interviews & Job Search | Career Growth with Adam Argyle

    Summary Software engineering career moves don't have to be a lottery. In this episode, Adam Argyle breaks down why the technical interview process is fundamentally broken, how design engineering skills actually transfer across roles, and the tactical job search playbook that works today. Whether you're navigating a career pivot, re-entering the market, or just frustrated with the hiring gauntlet, this conversation cuts through the noise on what really matters for career growth and staying sane. Links Adam’s Website: https://nerdy.dev/ Adam’s CascadiaJS 2025 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW6GECIzvsw 10 powerful ways to use CSS variables article: https://nerdy.dev/custom-prop-categories Sizzle Rizzle: https://nerdy.dev/sizzle-rizzle Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28 Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead

  • S1 · E59
    May 12 · 38 min

    Building the Decentralized Social Web: From Collective Social to OpenSocial

    Brittany shares her journey building Collective Social - a Goodreads-style app for all kinds of media built entirely on the AT Protocol - and how it led her to create OpenSocial, a service that lets any app on the decentralized web share group functionality like book clubs. The episode covers the challenges of representing groups when the protocol has no native concept of group identity, using conference talk deadlines as motivation to ship side projects, and rating real-world systems on how well they'd work in a decentralized context. Erika also shares her experience building an interpreter in Go. Show links: Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com Collective Social: https://collectivesocial.app OpenSocial: https://opensocial.community Collective Social on GitHub: https://github.com/collectivesocial "Representing groups in ATProto" blog post (Brittany's site) AtmosphereConf speaker profile: https://news.atmosphereconf.org/3mfpjx5luuc2m GitHub Blog - Build a Personal Organization Command Center with GitHub Copilot CLI: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/build-a-personal-organization-command-center-with-github-copilot-cli/ "The art of saying yes" blog post: https://brittanyellich.com/say-yes-do-all-the-things/ "Living in the inflection point" blog post: https://brittanyellich.com/living-in-the-inflection-point/ Nick Gerakines episode (EP19 - AT Proto, MCP, and Open Source): https://overcommitted.dev/ep-19-at-proto-mcp-and-open-source-with-nick-gerakines PDX ATProto talk: https://youtu.be/xFdak3HbDmM?si=rZoPfyYYoP2awADJ&t=2302 AtmosphereConf talk: https://youtu.be/GVOywon3X-Q?si=yzKLfFNF8bzNT9-e The ATProto Store: https://atstore.fyi pdsls.dev: https://pdsls.dev Atmosphere Community: https://atmosphere.community npmx.dev: https://npmx.dev Tangled: https://tangled.io This is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376492-this-is-for-everyone Topics: AT Protocol, Decentralized Social Media, Side Projects, Open Source, Software Engineering

  • S1 · E58
    May 5 · 46 min

    There are no shortcuts | Craft & career growth with Salma Alam-Naylor

    Summary In this episode, Erika talks with Salma Alam-Naylor about software engineering craft, programming best practices, and why the long game beats shortcuts. As AI coding tools proliferate and everyone chases speed, Salma digs into deliberate practice, sustainable career strategies, and building genuine expertise that compounds over time. Perfect for engineers feeling burnout from the hype cycle. Links Salma’s website: https://whitep4nth3r.com/ 2021 Jamstack Jammies (Community Creator Award) https://2021.jamstackconf.com/jammies/ Fat bear week website: https://explore.org/fat-bear-week Hell.com wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell.com Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Erika (Eggyhead): https://github.com/eggyhead

  • S1 · E57
    April 28 · 42 min

    Build Real Tools, Skip LeetCode: Systems Programming for Career Growth with John Crickett

    Tech careers don't need to mean grinding LeetCode. In episode 57, John Crickett — 30+ year engineer, Coding Challenges creator (90K+ subscribers) — makes the case that programmer productivity skyrockets when you build real tools instead. We dig into why your own Redis, Git, or shell beats practice problems, how Coding Challenges went from $17 domain to viral sensation (1,500 signups in one weekend), and what it means to level up through systems programming. Links Coding Challenges (Newsletter): https://codingchallenges.substack.com/ Coding Challenges Website: https://codingchallenges.fyi From The Challenges - Git: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/from-the-challenges-git Will AI Kill Coding?: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/will-ai-kill-coding Using AI To Solve A Coding Challenge: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/using-ai-to-solve-a-coding-challenge Tech Lead Journal #178 — John Crickett: https://techleadjournal.dev/episodes/178/ Confessions of a Data Guy — What Makes Great Engineers: https://www.confessionsofadataguy.com/decades-in-software-engineering-what-actually-makes-great-engineers-john-crickett/ Coding Chats Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/59GU7gzyK2RdIDVkhNS2nt John Crickett on GitHub: https://github.com/johncrickett John Crickett on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett John Crickett on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social John Crickett on X: https://x.com/johncrickett Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Bethany: https://trustyduck.dev Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com ⁠Erika: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead

  • S1 · E56
    April 21 · 39 min

    Run Toward Something - Career Growth, Mentorship & Work-Life Balance with Dave Schwantes

    Summary Career growth through mentorship and work-life balance with Dave Schwantes, Senior Software Engineer at GitHub. Brittany and Dave explore why running toward meaningful work beats running from burnout, how mentorship became his primary form of engineering leverage, and what career happiness actually looks like across different life stages. From Instacart and Couchsurfing to building in-house bootcamps, Dave shares how sustainable engineering culture beats individual productivity hacks—and his take on how AI tools reshape what engineers really need to master. Links Dave's personal site: https://dinosaurseateverybody.com Don't Break Prod (bite-sized career advice): https://dontbreakprod.com Grave Danger (Dave's spooky ska band) on Bandcamp: https://gravedangerskath.bandcamp.com Dave on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dorkrawk.bsky.social Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschwantes Dave on GitHub: https://github.com/dorkrawk Web Dev Challenge Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2sEoZG8EIw The Engineer Manager Pendulum article: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/ Host Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com

  • S1 · E55
    April 14 · 39 min

    Building Your Own Tech Career Path - Bootcamp, Teaching & Big Platforms with Sabrina Goldfarb

    Summary Sabrina Goldfarb rejected the tech career playbook. No CS degree, bootcamp instead, teaching before big platforms. Now an engineer on GitHub's Copilot team and instructor at Frontend Masters, she shares how methodical planning, patience, and trust in the process led to career growth most thought impossible. If you're considering a non-traditional path in software engineering, this episode proves there's more than one way to build a meaningful tech career. Links Frontend Masters: Practical Prompt Engineering: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/prompt-engineering/ Sabrina Goldfarb on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sabrinagoldfarb Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28 Erika (Eggyhead): https://github.com/eggyhead

  • S1 · E54
    April 7 · 49 min

    Building Bulletproof Systems: Warren Parad on Software Engineering for High Availability

    Summary In this episode of the Overcommitted Podcast, hosts Bethany and Erika sit down with Warren Parad, CTO and co-founder of Authress, a user authorization API built for reliability. Warren shares how his team stayed fully operational during the massive AWS US-East-1 outage in October 2025 using DNS failover and multi-region strategies, and what the delayed alert logs taught them about timestamp trust. The conversation kicks off with a candid discussion on AI agents and critical thinking, whether managing multiple coding agents is really multitasking or just micromanagement, and what the trade-offs mean for early-career engineers. Warren traces his reliability-first mindset back to his roots in electrical engineering and healthcare IT, where late-night on-call pages through Citrix proxies and hospital billing systems shaped how he thinks about uptime today. The group also explores what it really takes to build a Five Nines organization and how hiring practices need to match the reliability culture you want. The episode wraps up with a round of Never Have I Ever: SRE Edition, featuring Friday deploys gone wrong, blaming DNS, and discovering outages from customer tweets. Links Authress, Warren's company, user authorization API for software makers. The product he's building and wants to plug. Adventures in DevOps Podcast, Warren's podcast, co-hosted with Will Button. 300+ episodes on DevOps, engineering leadership, and cloud architecture. How When AWS Was Down, We Were Not, Authress's blog post detailing their resilience strategy during the October 2025 AWS outage. Referenced in Theme 1 questions. So You Want to Build Your Own Authorization?, Warren's article on why authorization complexity creeps up on teams. Referenced in Theme 2 questions. An Interview With Warren Parad, CIAM Weekly, March 2025 interview covering Warren's views on CIAM, FedCM, and the future of authentication. FedCM, Browser Native Auth (Adventures in DevOps Episode), Adventures in DevOps episode diving into FedCM and why authentication should move from user-land to kernel-land. Warren Parad on LinkedIn, Warren's LinkedIn profile. Warren Parad on Bluesky, Warren's Bluesky profile. Warren Parad on GitHub, Warren's GitHub profile, includes Authress repos, OpenAPI Explorer, and other open-source work. Authress Knowledge Base, Technical articles from the Authress team on auth, security, and infrastructure. Warren Parad, Personal Site, Warren's personal website. Hosts Overcommitted Bethany Janos Erika (Eggyhead)

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